Abstract: This research project aims to study two specific works of the Brazilian painter Rodolfo Amoedo titled The Last Tamoio (1883) and Maraba (1882). Such works will be examined within the context of his production in the second half of the nineteenth century trying to identify formal and programmatic aspects which approach and at the same time move back them from the creation policy of a national identity implemented by the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts during the nineteenth century. Trying to associate these paintings, very important in Amoedo's whole works, to the social, political and cultural environment of nineteenth century on Brazil, looking for his political and cultural intentions in the artistic context of that period. Furthermore we will study such paintings trying to recognize aspects of Amoedo's style that link them to his artistic development both in Brazil and in Europe, bringing different references in literature and painting areas which was a contribution to its conception. It will be essential to investigate how Amoedo disjoints the apparatus of exaltation of the "national Indian hero" myth, identifying aspects of a late breathless "indianism", exhausted on the eve of the Republic's proclamation. Therefore, it will be important to confront literature and fine arts within the premise of ut pictura poesis, since that first grew what is conventionally called "indianism". We propose a reflection about the image of the melancholic and tragic indian of the Amoedo's paintings above in detriment of the heroic and warrior indian of the literary production of the previous period and their role in the constitution of a national imaginary that used to have indian as a native symbol: through the different reinventions of its meaning which passed the indigenous body, whether in painting and sculpture, or in the field of illustration and literature, we are going to analyze how Amoedo introduces himself as a re-newer of the academic indianism, rearranging the specific elements of the nationalist rhetoric at the end of the Second Empire